THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603210492
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 121 lines
Running for office as a ``man of the people'' is easier than running a government that way. Just ask Randy Wright.
Wright, the unmistakable populist, donning a war bonnet to throw tax forms into the Hague in the late 1970s, has become in the '90s a complex Norfolk City Council member who supports the establishment's most crucial projects yet broke ranks to run a risky referendum drive against his own council.
Along the way he has made discoveries about the essential nature of populism, governing and himself.
``I know now it's easy to be a naysayer and be a little more popular in that sense,'' he said. ``It's not so easy to find a solution. It's a lot harder sitting on the other side of that desk.''
For Randy Wright, the lesson of governing has been compromise, a principle foreign to the nature of populism. Populists exhort, battle, even inflame. They do not negotiate or bargain.
In government, Wright said he learned, ``No elected official can be an island unto himself. You can't get anything done with one vote.''
Wright, now in his second term, firmly believed 18 years ago he would never run for office.
Wright and the city were different in the late 1970s. In Norfolk, the circles of leading businessmen and leading politicians had been closely intertwined for years. By the time an issue reached a public vote by the council, those in the circles of power had settled how they felt about it and what the vote would be. Unanimous votes became the rule.
The only power struggles were almost entirely within the West Side establishment.
Wright was from the East Side, the miles of older subdivisions in northeastern Norfolk, many of them legacies of wartime expansion, where blue-collar workers and retirees owned brick houses far simpler than the imposing stone keeps of Ghent and Larchmont.
Wright was a printer and a social outsider who readily acknowledged he was never the ``best-dressed'' or most popular kid.
But he felt connected enough to his community, Roosevelt Gardens, to get into its civic league, and eventually become the president. And in the late 1970s, he and several other civic leaders seized on the anti-tax movement sweeping the country.
The tax rate in Norfolk was $1.62, and people on the East Side didn't think they were getting their money's worth.
They created the Norfolk Tea Party, a wildly colorful band that picked its name shrewdly by evoking the Founding Fathers, connecting the anti-tax stance with patriotism.
``It was something that when people heard it, they didn't forget,'' Wright said. ``We got massive amounts of publicity.''
Their best-known stunt, in costumes vaguely reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party, was throwing boxes of tax forms into the Hague.
Their other strength was in organization. They collected 17,000 signatures on their anti-tax petition in one day by spreading supporters across 40 precincts over 13 hours. Eventually, they collected nearly 40,000.
In 1979, the council lowered the tax rate from $1.62 to $1.30. The Tea Party claimed victory for the reduction. The city maintained that the rate was cut because of a change in state law on assessments. The truth probably was somewhere in between.
Wright and the Tea Party used the organization's political power to oppose busing children out of their neighborhoods and eventually to support candidates. In 1986, he would run for the council himself and lose.
Wright stayed in politics, however. He had set up regular Saturday morning breakfasts, attended by dozens or hundreds of people, as an institution that kept him firmly entrenched in supporters' minds after those early campaigns had faded.
That became useful in 1990, when the courts forced Norfolk to begin electing council members from wards, equally dividing the city, instead of at large. With an organization based on the civic leagues and the old Tea Party, Wright rolled to overwhelming victory in the new Ward 5 in 1992.
The following two years were the most difficult of Wright's political career.
He spent much of the first year quietly learning the ways of the council. Then in the summer of 1993 the city announced its plans to raze and redevelop a section of East Ocean View. Wright supported the project.
``I thought people were going to say, hooray, the city is finally paying attention to East Ocean View,'' Wright said. ``But they drew up the defenses and made me Public Enemy No. 1.''
Suddenly, Wright was a member of the establishment, and a vocal minority of Ocean View residents attacked him as a traitor.
He held two town hall meetings on the project, and was visibly upset by the sometimes savage criticism. He points out that if it weren't for him, the council might not have held even those two meetings.
The council ultimately approved the project. After East Ocean View, what remains of the old Randy Wright is ``tougher,'' he says.
``I can walk into a group that's anti-Randy Wright and I can take it,'' he said recently. ``I can stick to my guns.
``I don't know how that fits into a populist mold. I'm not sure.''
Within a few months, he found an opportunity to rebuild his populist image. In November 1993 the council, deeply divided, voted to allow Calvary Revival Church to build a new sanctuary on East Little Creek Road.
Wright voted against it and then took the unusual step of helping to run a referendum effort against the council that counted him as a member.
``To anyone who said that Randy Wright had given up all his populist credentials, I think I defied that,'' he said. It was an easy role to step into, probably easier than the council seat, he said: ``I enjoyed being me. I felt comfortable leading a charge.''
The Calvary Revival battle had all the best and worst qualities of a populist campaign: It challenged an unpopular political decision; it galvanized a community against what it saw as an intruder; and it tapped into the fears of some in a mostly white community facing the prospect of a mostly black church.
Wright says racism had nothing to do with his motive, but he knows there were people in the neighborhoods who felt that way.
``It's the dark side of any populist movement, I guess, that there are people in it who don't have the best motives,'' he said.
Whatever the reasons, the movement was successful, forcing the council to rescind its decision within three months rather than endure a potentially divisive city-wide referendum.
Wright said he now understands the dangers of trying to remain a populist in office:
``You can build a very hard core of support, but you irritate a whole lot of other people, too. You step on a lot of toes.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Randy Wright
by CNB